Testing of hardware wiring boards in a system has become increasingly more difficult to accomplish wherein key prerequisites include an appropriate level of testing that is accomplished in a timely manner. This is due, mainly, to an increasing complexity of the wiring boards brought about by smaller and more complex board components. There are manually created test solutions or the use of special fixturing to an In-Circuit Tester for a specific slot configuration. The manually created tests, often using an automatically controlled probe, are becoming more difficult due to this more complex technology. In some cases, the probe is not physically small enough to appropriately contact the interconnections between the smaller circuit components. Additionally, when a large number of circuit boards need to be tested, manual testing is often too time consuming. The special fixturing approach may entail a physical modification of the boards to be tested, which could add non-functional failure modes.
These testing modes have brought about the use of components having built-in testing circuitry that allows more automated testing of the circuit boards. These components are generally referred to as boundary scan components, and the IEEE Standard 1149.1 governing design, registers, protocols and testing of boundary scan components is employed. Some commercial boundary scan tool suppliers have developed methods to adapt board level test generation to a backplane. Unfortunately, all these solutions assume there is a fixed or set configuration of boards in backplane slots that will not change. Thus, these solutions will not be able to adapt to the need where a system may require multiple configurations in a given backplane depending on a customer's order (e.g., telecommunications systems).
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an enhanced way to provide testing support for all system configurations that may be provided in a common backplane.